The AEM Manufacturing Express continued its voyage through Upstate New York with a visit to the Cummins’ Jamestown Engine Plant, only a few minutes south of Chautauqua Lake.  

The Cummins Jamestown Engine Plant facility is massive: a million square feet of manufacturing that runs a quarter mile end to end. A customer on a recent tour clocked 3,000 steps end-to-end during a facility tour. Half the plant assembles engines, roughly 520 a day, most of them 15-liter diesels bound for semi trucks hauling goods across the country. The other half is a machining plant, turning out more than 100,000 camshafts a year. 

Cummins opened here 52 years ago in an empty furniture factory with 20 employees, picking a small town on purpose because that’s where the company knew they could have the biggest impact. The plant was organized around team-based work from day one. “We are guided by not rules, but concepts,” said Ryan Barilar, Director of Finance at the Jamestown Engine Plant. Those guiding concepts: trust, equity, growth, flexibility, and excellence.

The Manufacturing Express events here at the Jamestown Engine Plant was a celebration of those guiding concepts and the success they have brought this team and this community. The team here is so huge that there were actually two distinct events: One on Monday evening at 9:30 PM for the third shift and one on Tuesday morning for the day shift. The facility is so big that the bus parked inside as employees from all different departments came to enjoy some delicious local sausage, play games, and win prizes before returning to work to build the engines that keep America moving.

Cummins’ customers aren’t only the truck drivers at the end of the line. They are other Cummins plants, taking the components machined here and applying them to engines being built elsewhere. “If one part of the chain does not work, the entire thing is not going to work well,” said Banilar.

This plant’s success ultimately comes from its people, and Cummins has managed to find such great people by going through non-traditional manufacturing pathways. Jennifer Lundmark’s degree is in music education, and she expected to be a band director. “I truly came here temporarily, and I never imagined staying,” she said. Thirteen years later, she has worked third shift assembly, the camshaft line, and the warehouse, and now runs community relations. “If you are a good worker, you’re willing to learn, and you work well with others, I really feel like you can go anywhere you want in this company,” Lundmark said.

Even though employees come from different backgrounds, all of them have the same goal of wanting to help the local community. Every Cummins employee is paid for at least four hours a year to leave their job and serve their community. This spring the plant shut down engine assembly for a Day of Caring, and roughly 300 employees fanned out across 40 organizations to paint libraries and clear nature trails. Fourteen spent a day recently staining a barn at Centaur Stride, a horse therapy program down the road.

Five hundred and twenty engines leave this building every weekday. Those engines go into trucks that move essential products all across the country. What happens in this facility in Jamestown, New York keeps America moving. But the opportunities provided by Cummins here in town are what keep Jamestown moving.